I am trundling happily through Cal Newport’s A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. I’m reading it on my phone, because it makes me feel more productive and connected. I have found that whenever I pick up a book, everyone starts talking to me, whereas when I’m looking at my phone, everyone else just turns and looks at their phones, and so we sit silently, gazing raptly at our phones. Also, I was able to get it on Kindle for only a couple of dollars, and so it seemed to be the obvious choice.
So far, I feel so seen and heard. There are some great lines I’ll just share, as it were, from my heart. My favorite is this one:
There’s something uniquely deranging about digital messaging. 38
I also like this one:
To your entrenched social circuitry, evolved over millennia of food shortages mitigated through strategic alliances, these unanswered messages become the psychological equivalent of ignoring a tribe member who might later prove key to surviving the next drought. From this perspective, the crowded email inbox is not just frustrating—it’s a matter of life or death. 44
And this:
The subjects were bathed in anxiety, even though their rational minds, if asked, would admit that there was nothing going on in that laboratory that was actually worth worrying about. 46
And, just to string things together so that they create a narrative that isn’t quite what Newport saying, but certainly comforts me a great deal:
The only cure is to prevent the messages from arriving altogether. 46
This morning I started on chapter three, which is a walk down memory lane. How did email come to be? What sort of revolution was it? How did the world come to view this particular mode of communication? And why, when it could have just made things better, did it end up making everything worse? I stopped to remember how I sent my first email. I was in boarding school in West Africa, and suddenly the long Sunday afternoon letter-writing time disappeared in a blast of hot harmattan sand and I was in the air-conditioned computer lab, composing the usual epistle on a computer instead of by hand. I hit send, and a few days later I got a reply. The gap of a few days was because my parents would haul their small personal computer to the road to the only telephone in our village, plug it in, push send receive, get all their messages, take it home, plug the computer into the strip connected to the car batteries connected to the solar panels, read the message, write something, go back to the road, and so on and so forth.
It was entrancing to get weekly letters from home, instead of monthly. It was thrilling to sit in that cool lab and type it all out, instead of sweating on the cement floor of my dorm room, trying to get cool, writing everything by hand.
By Carl Larsson - Erik Cornelius / Nationalmuseum, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52134555
And then, of course, my grandmother got an email account and began sending out the reems of out-of-context Bible verses to all her nineteen grandchildren instead of having to write them down on a piece of paper and put them in the mail. Sending someone a random verse from Holy Writ and leaving the recipient to figure out the intentions of her heart was her love language. Then she figured out how to get everyone on one single list and her time was halved again and she was able to more fully devote herself to tearing bits of paper on which she had composed announcements and scraps of poetry and taping them together for the church newsletter.
So anyway, I’m not against written communication, even electronic. By gum, I am able to send this deathless prose daily directly into your inboxes—not coercively—but because you signed up! What a delight! I have something to say, you want to read it, and we don’t have to go through the Zuch or the Musk to encounter each other.
It’s just that every human invention comes with some hidden consequence that no one ever thought of. In the case of email, lots more work, busyness, and heightened anxiety. In the case of social media—a subject upon which Newport has expressed deep wisdom in various other books—having all your messages read by your governor. I happened to see this on the app formerly known as Twitter yesterday, posted by I meme therefore I am:
BREAKING: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that New York is "collecting data" from "surveillance efforts" on social media. If you say something considered “hate speech” on social media, Hochul’s administration will try to contact you. “What’s being said on social media platforms. And we have launched an effort to be able to counter some of the negativity and reach out to people when we see hate speech being spoken about on online platforms” This is so New Yorkers not only “feel safe" but “be safe” even though Guiliani’s Democratic successor got rid of his Stop and Frisk which actually made NY safe.
If you watch the video—which you can find at that link because I can’t embed it—you’ll see Hochul’s awkward manner of speaking, her glassy expression, and her usual hand gestures. She looks unprepossessing and sort of benign, but when you consider how New York City and State have been handling increasingly alarming attacks on ordinary citizens going about their daily lives, and the march over the weekend, you might not be faulted for more intensely feeling that looming sense of anxious derangement. Because they—whoever they are—don’t always immediately catch, try, convict, and then incarcerate the people who do violent things. Some of the time—too often in fact—they let them go and the person who stepped in to stop or to help is the one who gets in trouble. Why do they need to collect data from social media? Why can’t they go around and lock up the people who have already been seen with the naked eye in broad daylight to have committed violent and hateful crimes? I don’t want to be paranoid, but we’ve already seen the answer to that question all over the place.
That square inch of emotional space between “being” safe and “feeling” safe is why we can’t have nice things like email or social media. Actually being safe is too far down the line to consider. It is the feelings long before you get there that govern and decide the course of life and the final outcome. For, indeed, the only way to actually be safe is to put your whole self into the hands of Jesus, to save you forever. Though your body may die (I’m in the middle of Job—sorry) yet shall you live, if you trust him. But in the valley of dismay and anxiety, a lot of other kinds of messaging rush in to assuage the feelings of deep unsafety.
So anyway, have a nice day!
The initiative from Hochul is chilling.